SARASOTA, FLA.—Insanity takes many forms, some of them blessedly benign, such as the one affecting the conductor Victor DeRenzi. He wants his opera company to become the first to perform everything Giuseppe Verdi ever wrote. Where is that opera company located? Sarasota, Fla.

Now before you collapse over your spilled bottle of Chianti in a fit of uncontrollable giggling, let me assure you — as Canadian snowbirds have already discovered — that the city on the shores of Sarasota Bay offers visitors much more than a winter tan and condo prices unavailable at the corner of Avenue Road and St. Clair.

One of the great collections of Baroque art resides in the Ringling Museum (yes, that Ringling; a circus museum shares real estate on the late millionaire's waterfront estate). There is also a resident symphony orchestra, a ballet company, professional theatre and a multi-purpose performing arts centre, boldly painted in lavender and purple (don't ask!), where the Toronto Symphony Orchestra performed under Peter Oundjian's direction during the course of its 2011 Florida tour.

Perhaps most remarkable of all is a building in a vaguely Spanish colonial style stretching along North Pineapple Avenue and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Built in 1926 as a legitimate playhouse, it was purchased, renovated and expanded to become the elegant asylum for Victor DeRenzi's insanity, the 1,100-seat Sarasota Opera House.

It is there, every year for more than two decades, that one version of one of Verdi's 30-odd operas (if we count various revisions) has occupied an honored place in a repertory winter festival season of four operas (a fifth appears now in the fall). This season's Verdi installment was Otello, next season it will be the Italian master's almost completely unknown comedy Un giorno di Regno (King for a Day).

The Verdi cycle began almost acccidentally when DeRenzi staged Rigoletto in 1989 in the style of the 1850s and followed it a year later with a similarly staged production of the virtually unknown Aroldo. “At the end of one of the big finales our audience actually stood up and cheered,” he recalled the other day, “so I thought to myself, if a completely unknown Verdi opera gets that kind of response, maybe the others will too.”

If DeRenzi has a strategy in his ongoing Verdi campaign, it is the same one he uses for the other operas mounted on Sarasota's stage over the past 30 years of his artistic directorship.

At a time when many sister companies are modernizing the look of traditional operas (the Canadian Opera Company's current double bll of Zemlinsky's A Florentine Tragedy and Puccini's Gianni Schicchi at the Four Seasons Centre has been moved forward in time by director Catherine Malfitano from the Renaissance to the twentieth century), he tries to remain faithful to the composer's original intentions.

He characterizes this historically determined approach, without irony, as avant garde and it seems to be appreciated by his audiences. “The aesthetic of this company is not determined by the directors,” he insists. It is determined by me.”

As someone who has visited opera houses in dozens of countries on five continents I found this approach refreshing. The four operas I heard in Sarasota really looked the way they sounded and DeRenzi's practice of employing highly engaged young singers facilitated dramatic credibility.

True, Otello could have benefitted from a larger orchestra, but as conducted by DeRenzi and directed by Stephanie Sundine (a well- remembered Salome in the Canadian Opera Company's 1986 production of Strauss's opera and Katya in its 1994 production of Janacek's Katya Kabanova), with a heroic tenor in the title role (Puerto Rican-born Rafael Davila), it worked surprisingly well on Sarasota's less than commodious stage.

The agile coloratura of soprano Kathleen Kim in the ritle role helped animiate Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. The sexy Carmen of Fredrika Brillembourg failed to exert a similar influence on a rather ordinary account of Bizet's opera (staged, naturally, in the original opera-comique manner, with spoken French dialogue).

What stood out for me this season was a rare revival of an opera that won Samuel Barber the Pulitzer Prize in 1958, the Metropolitan Opera-premiered Vanessa, part of Sarasota Opera's recently inaugurated American Classics series, with Kara Shay Thomson a powerful interpreter of the title role.

Not bad for an enterprise operating on an $8.6-million (U.S.) budget. Like most opera companies facing the economic downturn of recent years, Sarasota Opera has had to trim sails, but by making what executive director Susan Danis calls “a pre-emptive strike” on its budget following the 2008 season, this company has preserved its financial viability and retained its status as one of the best reasons for a visit to the welcoming west coast of Florida.

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